Justin Kan takes on TaskRabbit with Exec

Justin Kan could be forgiven for taking some time off from starting companies.

The 28-year-old entrepreneur is perhaps best known for Justin.tv, which launched in 2006 and broadcast video of his daily life around the world. Last year, with the site still humming along as a personal broadcasting network, Kan helped spin two new startups out of the company: SocialCam, a mobile video app; and Twitch.tv, a video-game broadcasting network.

But as he looked at his projects, Kan noticed that he wasn’t expected to play a big role at any of them. All of the major tasks had been delegated to co-founders and other executives. And that left Kan, who says he’s happiest when building things with his own hands, without enough to do.

All that led Kan back to the drawing board. This morning he’s emerging with Exec, a personal assistant service that will compete with TaskRabbit and similar services that allow you to outsource your errands.

Exec’s hook is that it provides an assistant on demand for a set price — $25 an hour. That makes it different and potentially faster than TaskRabbit, where contractors have to bid on jobs and negotiate the price they’ll be paid. In that way Exec could be compared to car service Uber, which is usually faster than hailing a taxi but charges a premium for the privilege.

“It’s the easiest way to outsource something you want to do,” Kan said.

A task that took an Exec two hours would cost $50, with the majority going to the contractor. (The company wouldn’t divulge exactly how much, saying they are still tweaking the formula.) By contrast, the average task on TaskRabbit costs $45, a company spokesman said.

Exec launched in beta recently with 30 contractors, who went through several interviews and a criminal background check. Testers have been using the service to arrange deliveries, have research done, and clean their homes.

Kan says some time-sensitive tasks can’t be accomplished through more established marketplaces. The idea for Exec came to him when he was on his way to Burning Man with a carload of friends, one of whom realized he had forgotten his ticket after they were already 200 miles outside San Francisco. They had another friend who was also headed to Burning Man, and could bring the ticket with him — but only if they got him the ticket within the next 30 minutes.

Fixing the problem required persuading an Uber driver to deliver the ticketless friend’s apartment keys to their third friend. They pulled it off, but barely. Exec would have solved the problem much more easily, Kan said.

“There are other services for things that are more scheduled,” Kan said. “But when you really need something right then, we’re a great way to do that.”

For his latest startup, Kan turned to a family member for help. Daniel Kan, his younger brother and a former head of business development at customer-service startup UserVoice, co-founded Exec and will run hiring and operations. A third co-founder, Amir Ghazvinian, holds a master’s degree from Stanford in bioinformatics.

Daniel Kan, 25, said he hoped the company would help reduce chronic underemployment by giving artists, musicians and other freelancers an easy way to make money on the side.

The company is part of the current class at prominent Silicon Valley incubator Y Combinator, where Justin Kan is a part-time adviser. To date they have not taken on additional investment.